Visual Literacy

What pedagogical strategies make use of the affordances of visual literacy?

Visual literacy is an essential element for organising managing and sharing ideas - it develops critical thinking and is appropriate for all areas of learning - teachers should design learning activities that:

• help learners explicitly, through practical exposition, to recognise and differentiate the quantity of visual material around them
• allow learners time to discuss and reflect on visual materials, eg pause video clips
• offer frameworks for critical analysis and discussion of images
• provide access to (and support for) using image manipulation, creation and editing tools and software
• teach learners to develop design skills
• allow learners to collect and curate images and also develop important curation skills including annotating, tagging and other metadata skills
• encourage learners to present ideas and concepts visually using a minimum, of text
• help learners understand the provenance of visual sources. copyright IP and licensing, including Public Domain and Creative Commons.

The following references are part of the evidence base for this resource.

Burden, K., Leask, M. Younie, (2014)  S. Teaching and Learning with ICT in the Primary School, Routledge

Hall, M.  Roussac P. A., Graphicacy: The Neglected Fourth “R”  (2011) http://theasideblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/graphicacy-neglected-fourth-r.html

Using Social Media to Teach Visual Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom http://www.edutopia.org/blog/social-media-visual-literacy-classroom-dave-guymon